Welcome to a land Ray Bradbury calls "the Undiscovered Country" of his
imagination--that vast territory of ideas, concepts, notions and conceits
where the stories you now hold were born. America's premier living author
of short fiction, Bradbury has spent many lifetimes in this remarkable
place--strolling through empty, shadow-washed fields at midnight; exploring
long-forgotten rooms gathering dust behind doors bolted years ago to keep
strangers locked out.. and secrets locked in. The nights are longer in
this country. The cold hours of darkness move like autumn mists deeper
and deeper toward winter. But the moonlight reveals great magic here--and
a breathtaking vista.

THE OCTOBER COUNTRY
is many places: a picturesque Mexican village where death is a tourist
attraction; a city beneath the city where drowned lovers are silently
reunited; a carnival midway where a tiny man's most cherished fantasy
can be fulfilled night after night. THE OCTOBER COUNTRY'S inhabitants
live, dream, work, die--and sometimes live again--discovering, often too
late, the high price of citizenship. Here a glass jar can hold memories
and nightmares; a woman's newborn child can plot murder; and a man's skeleton
can war against him. Here there is no escaping the dark stranger who lives
upstairs...or the reaper who wields the world. Each of these stories is
a wonder, imagined by an acclaimed tale-teller writing from a place shadows.
But there is astonishing beauty in these shadows, born from a prose that
enchants and enthralls. Ray Bradbury's THE OCTOBER COUNTRY is a
land of metaphors that can chill like a long-after-midnight wind...as
they lift the reader high above a sleeping Earth on the strange wings
of Uncle Einar.

The Dwarf

Aimee watched the sky, quietly.

Tonight was one of those motionless hot summer nights.
The concrete pier empty, the strung red, white, yellow bulbs burning like
insects in the air above the wooden emptiness. The managers of the various
carnival pitches stood, like melting wax dummies, eyes staring blindly,
not talking, all down the line.

Two customers had passed through an hour before. Those
two lonely people were now in the roller coaster, screaming murderously
as it plummeted down the blazing night, around one emptiness after another.

Aimee moved slowly across the strand, a few worn wooden
hoopla rings sticking to her wet hands. She stopped behind the ticket
booth that fronted the MIRROR MAZE. She saw herself grossly misrepresented
in three rippled mirrors outside the Maze. A thousand tired replicas of
herself dissolved in the corridor beyond, hot images among so much clear
coolness.

She stepped inside the ticket booth and stood looking
a long while at Ralph Banghart's thin neck. He clenched an unlit cigar
between his long uneven yellow teeth as he laid out a battered game of
solitaire on the ticket shelf

When the roller coaster walled and fell in its terrible
avalanche again, she was reminded to speak.

"What kind of people go up in roller coasters?"

Ralph Banghart worked his cigar a full thirty seconds.
"People wanna die. That rollie coaster's the handiest thing to dying there
is." He sat listening to the faint sound of rifle shots from the shooting
gallery. "This whole damn carny business's crazy. For instance, that dwarf
You seen him? Every night, pays his dime, runs in the Mirror Maze all
the way back through to Screwy Louie's Room. You should see this little
runt head back there. My God!"

"Oh, yes," said Aimee, remembering. "I always wonder
what it's like to be a dwarf I always feel sorry when I see him."

"I could play him like an accordion."

"Don't say that!"

"My Lord." Ralph patted her thigh with a free hand.
"The way you carry on about guys you never even met." He shook his head
and chuckled. "Him and his secret. Only he don't know I know, see? Boy
howdy!"

"It's a hot night." She twitched the large wooden
hoops nervously on her damp fingers.

The Dwarfs hand, hairy and dark, appeared all by itself
reaching up into the booth window with a silver dime. An invisible person
called, "One!" in a high, child's voice.

Involuntarily, Aimee bent forward.

The Dwarf looked up at her, resembling nothing more
than a dark-eyed, dark-haired, ugly man who has been locked in a winepress,
squeezed and wadded down and down, fold on fold, agony on agony, until
a bleached, outraged mass is left, the face bloated shapelessly, a face
you know must stare wide-eyed and awake at two and three and four o'clock
in the morning, lying flat in bed, only the body asleep.

Ralph tore a yellow ticket in half "One!"

The Dwarf, as if frightened by an approaching storm,
pulled his black coat-lapels tightly about his throat and waddled swiftly.
A moment later, ten thousand lost and wandering dwarfs wriggled between
the mirror flats, like frantic dark beetles, and vanished.

"Quick!"

Ralph squeezed Aimee along a dark passage behind the
mirrors. She felt him pat her all the way back through the tunnel to a
thin partition with a peekhole.

"This is rich," he chuckled. "Go on-look."

Aimee hesitated, then put her face to the partition.

"You see him?" Ralph whispered.

Aimee felt her heart beating. A full minute passed.

There stood the Dwarf in the middle of the small blue
room. His eyes were shut. He wasn't ready to open them yet. Now, now he
opened his eyelids and looked at a large mirror set before him. And what
he saw in the mirror made him smile. He winked, he pirouetted, he stood
sidewise, he waved, he bowed, he did a little clumsy dance.

And the mirror repeated each motion with long, thin
arms, with a tall, tall body, with a huge wink and an enormous repetition
of the dance, ending in a gigantic bow!

"Every night the same thing," whispered Ralph in Aimee's
ear. "Ain't that rich?"

Aimee turned her head and looked at Ralph steadily
out of her motionless face, for a long time, and she said nothing. Then,
as if she could not help herself, she moved her head slowly and very slowly
back to stare once more through the opening. She held her breath. She
felt her eyes begin to water.

Ralph nudged her, whispering.

"Hey, what's the little gink doin' now?"

They were drinking coffee and not looking at each
other in the ticket booth half an hour later, when the Dwarf came out
of the mirrors. He took his hat off and started to approach the booth,
when he saw Aimee and hurried away.

"He wanted something," said Aimee.

"Yeah." Ralph squashed out his cigarette, idly. I
know what, too. But he hasn't got the nerve to ask. One night in this
squeaky little voice he says, 'I bet those mirrors are expensive.' Well,
I played dumb. I said yeah they were. He sort of looked at me, waiting,
and when I didn't say any more, he went home, but next night he said,
'I bet those mirrors cost fifty, a hundred bucks.' I bet they do, I said.
I laid me out a hand of solitaire."

"Ralph," she said.

He glanced up. "Why you look at me that way?"

"Ralph," she said, "why don't you sell him one of
your extra ones?"

"A dark compendium of tales."
 Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star

"A collection that has been indoctrinating kids into the delights of dread for over 40 years."
 Washington Post Book World

"His short story collection, THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, has been read, loved, and remembered by many as among the finest in the field."
 Washington Post Book World